FINANCE
• The debris falling off the new Bank of America tower at 42nd Street may have been metaphoric. The firm just reported steep losses, and their wannabe investment-banking unit, set to anchor the new tower, performed the worst. [MarketBeat/WSJ, Deal Journal/WSJ]
• Congrats, James Cayne — nobody wants anything to do with Bear Stearns. Contrary to reports, both Warren Buffett and China's Citic Bank denied any interest in the bank. [DealBook/NYT]
• Today's the real anniversary of the 1987 stock-market crash, but at least one veteran thinks parallels to the present are overblown. "The market is just like generals — everyone prepares for the last war." [MarketBeat/WSJ]

Former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald was back in court in Ann Arbor, Mich., yesterday, testifying further about his series on how Justin Berry, an allegedly abused teen who was performing on Internet porn sites, made its way into the Times — and led to an editor's note in the paper earlier this week that left Eichenwald angry at the Times. (He's also angry with this reporter.)
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What does it look like when a Timesman buys a sex slave? Well, we don't know, because we haven't seen Nick Kristof's Cambodian receipts. But we do know what it looks like when a Timesman lends someone out of prostitution. As part of the legal processes set in motion by Kurt Eichenwald's December 2005 investigative series on online child porn, the $2,000 check he wrote to Justin Berry was subpoenaed. Here it is. (Click on it for a larger version.)

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Former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald was in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, courtroom this morning, a witness in a child-porn prosecution captioned State of Michigan v. Kenneth Gourlay. But when Eichenwald took the stand, it could have been renamed "$2,000 Check v. Journalism 101" — and Eichenwald's testimony showed he knows he broke the rules.
Earlier this week, the Times disclosed in an editors' note that Eichenwald had "loaned" $2,000 to 18-year-old Justin Berry, the subject of a controversial series Eichenwald published in December 2005, which led to a congressional hearing about the danger of Webcams to kids, and to charges against several gay men accused of molesting Berry and helping him manage his porn sites. Eichenwald and the Times had previously disclosed reporting irregularities — that Eichenwald spent several weeks in contact with Berry without disclosing that he was a reporter, that he helped put him in touch with authorities — but news of the loan first appeared in yesterday's paper. He and the paper received a barrage of criticism over the news (he's also received criticism from this reporter, in an incident explained here), and on the midwestern witness stand today, he tried to explain.
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